The Rack
by staceycj
Summary: Dean's memories of how he "got off the rack." Will be posted in three parts. Language and mature themes inside. Spoilers for 4X10
1. Chapter 1

"All you have to do is get off the rack. That's all you have to do. The restraints aren't there. Just get up. Come to me. Help me with the new arrivals. There is a new one, a mother that made a deal with my associate, her life for her child's. She needs to be initiated into hell. She needs to see, just like you, that sacrificing your soul for someone else's isn't worth anything."

"Go fuck yourself." Dean said shakily. Even though his body had been reformed, and was perfect, his mind was damaged and he shook, every day, all day. He wanted the shaking to stop. "It was worth it." He ground out thinking about his brother, thinking about Sam with Bobby, safe and alive. That was what made what was about to happen worth it--worth the torture, worth the pain, worth the despair.

"If you think so." Alistair looked over to his assistant. "Stretch him. Let's see if we can make him as tall that brother he felt was so important to save." Alistair waved the command on as if he were ordering a baked potato with his steak. Alistair was gone for what seemed like hours, but Dean knew it was only moments. He was waiting for them to start the torture. Waiting was worse than the actual pain. The pain would stop when there was nothing left to cut up, stretch, carve or dismember. The waiting could last forever. It made him twitch, it made him shake harder almost to the point of convulsing, when the meat hooks in his sides, arms and legs, started to pull, slowly, slowly so they could maximize the pain. Couldn't have the pain end to quickly now. Demons like to listen to the great Dean Winchester scream, and scream he did as he felt his skin stretch and split, and his joints pop and separate and finally his arms come away from his torso, then his legs, one at a time, just so the pain and screaming would last. Dean's head and torso fell to the filthy ground, his arms and legs hanging from the chains above. He cried, and screamed when the demon came closer, dull knife in one hand, and hot poker in another. He didn't see anything after his eyeballs popped like a grape….

"All you have to do is get off the rack. That's all you have to do. The restraints aren't there. Just get up. Come to me. Help me with the new arrivals. There is a guy whose wife had cancer, her brain was becoming jelly, and he couldn't stand to watch her suffer, so he made a deal, a deal to save her. Come on Dean. Come on and help me show him the ropes."

"Never." Dean said. "Go…"

"Fuck myself. Yes yes yes, you've been saying that for years Dean. But you know that what you sacrificed yourself for is no longer living." Dean stilled.

"What?"

"It's been over 30 years. Sam died. There is no reason for you to resist anymore Dean. But, oh well, one more day of hearing your screams is like a precious stone that you can't throw away or be disappointed in receiving. Carry on." He said and disappeared like usual.

Today, today, they pulled each of his teeth out, one by one, making sure to dig deep into his gums when the roots broke because of their pulling. Once he was toothless, they reached in his mouth and cut out his tongue. What an exquisite pain that was, blinding, white hot, and his blood flowed down his throat and he choked, and then while he was choking they pulled out one of his fingernails nice and slow, and he took a deep breath and he couldn't breath, couldn't yell, and he was in such pain and agony that he passed out.

"All you have to do is get off the rack. That's all you have to do. The restraints aren't there. Just get up. Come to me. Help me with the new arrivals."

"I'll do it." He said and stood, he got off that rack….

Sam stopped reading and looked up at his brother. "That's what happened?" his voice was soft and cracking. Tears rolled down his face and hit the leather bound journal he had bought for his brother. After Dean told him that little piece of hell, Sam bought the journal, encouraged him to write in it, encouraged him to get it out of his system, and he did, and Sam asked if he could read it. Dean had said no for days. Finally, giving in when Sam said he needed to understand the nightmares that were plaguing his brother, needed to understand, needed to know how to help. He gave the eyes, those blasted puppy dog eyes, and Dean relented.

He licked his lips and braved a look at his brother. "You read what I did?"

"No. I read what they did to you. Dean. I'm---"

"Don't say you're sorry, you haven't read what I did to them."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters."

"Dean."

"Stop Sam. You wanted me to write in the freaking journal. I did. You wanted to read it. So you read it. Please don't make me talk about it too." Dean's eyes pleaded. He looked down at his lap and the knee that had been bouncing since Sam took the journal. "I gotta get out of here. I'll be back." He said and grabbed his car keys and was out of the motel room faster than you could say his name.

Sam looked back down at the writing on the page, and he started to cry, now that Dean wasn't in the room. His poor brother. 30 years of pain and torture for what? For his life? No. It wasn't worth it.


	2. Helpless Scared Lost

The journal had been removed from Sam's possession, without his reading anymore of it, shortly after he read the first couple of pages. Dean kept it with him. Kept it away from his brother's prying eyes, but he wrote in it, kept it next to the knife under his pillow at night.

"Dean?" Sam started as he stepped out of the bathroom, hair still dripping and face red from the hot water, for once the motel in which they were staying seemed to have a good heating system. He stopped when he realized his brother was asleep, with his clothes on, shoes on, again, and had his journal on his chest, pen dangling from the hand that was resting beside him.

Sam sighed, realized that his brother had, yet again, stayed up so long and tired his body to the point of dropping. Dean never used to be like this. He never wore himself out to the point of sheer and total exhaustion. Sam shook his head, went to his brother, took off his boots, and took the journal off of his chest and his pen out of his hand and sat down on his bed, and ran a hand over his long face.

"What do I do for you Dean?" he asked quietly starring at his sleeping brother, watching him jerk and twitch. Sam knew from experience, that the minimal jerking and twitching wasn't the nightmares. They were just the prelude to them, and that he could have an hour or five minutes before the real terror started to kick in. When his breathing changed, that was the time to wake him. At first, Sam woke him when he jerked but when he did Dean didn't understand why, he couldn't remember the dreams. So he learned just when to start the process of waking his brother. He wished he knew more, knew how to stop them, knew what was plaguing his brother's dreams.

He sighed, looked up at the waters stained ceiling of the motel room and prayed for assistance. God wanted his brother out of hell, wanted him to help fight this war, but he Dean is useless without sleep, without rest, and the nightmares were making him a less than effective warrior. He sighed again and looked down and he realized that he was still holding his brother's journal. He looked at Dean, then back at the book, wondered for a moment what his brother had written since he last read it. More pages were wrinkled and smeared with his brother's frantic writing than there were the last time. He looked up at Dean again, gave a silent prayer off forgiveness and read

_**Demons come in all shapes and sizes. They come in every variation of disgusting and disturbing. When they are in human bodies you can only see the evil manifest in their eyes, the simple turn from beautiful human eyes to oil slick black. In the pit, you see their true evil, the true disfigurement that hell has caused. Yeah, a real friggin' picnic. **_

_**Some of them have a human shape, but that is where it begins and ends. One or two that enjoyed torturing me, now that I think back because God knows I wasn't forming coherent thoughts while I was there, sort of looked like Windegos. They were tall and spindly. Their faces long and gaunt, teeth long and jagged, like a shark almost. That wasn't exactly the part that was most frightening, I mean yeah sure, that was scary as hell, but what was worse was seeing their eyes, in the pit, their eyes didn't turn black, they stayed the color they originally were, sort of like a reminder that the face you are looking into, the face that is about to enjoy torturing you was human once, that those blue, green, brown or hazel eyes once held someone they loved, once did something other than rip and shred souls. **_

_**When me and Sam were at that school and saw one of those masks, my God it reminded me of one of the demons, one of the better equipped demons, who loved taking just small bite size chunks out of me before laughing, his eyes were blue. Ice blue. He was damn good at his job. Too good. His fingers were long, I remember those fingers, they are something I will never forget. They were sort of like Sam's. Real long and real thin. Sometimes when Sam grabs my arm, I can feel that damn demon touching me, that's why I can't let Sam grab hold of my bare skin too often. Triggers too many thoughts, too many horrific experiences of my time there.**_

_**What is really horrible…is that those evil sons of bitches could change their shapes. Once you got too used to their real shapes, they would change, mutate…they could look like you, they could look like your loved ones. The first one they used was Mom. I went nuts, hysterical, my own mother spent time torturing me. And what is horrible, truly horrible is that while they are wearing your loved one's face, you believe that it is that person, that what they are saying, is what they truly think and feel about you. You completely forget it is some demon masquerading as your loved one. You just sink that much further into despair. **_

_**I had one who looked like Dad, and he kept telling me over and over again how I was such a horrible son, but the worst, yeah, the worst was the one who looked like Sam and continually told me that I was just a puppet, that I didn't have a mind of my own, told me that I wasn't worth anything, that I was just a mindless witless soldier and that I deserved this hell, that he just came down to torture me a little, give a little back so to speak. That was horrible. The man I died for telling me that I was worthless and that he was up there dancing on my grave. Demons. My God.**_

_**But at the end of the day, or a least before you become blind, or before you are so shredded by them, they turn back into what they really are. Tall, short, skeletal, fat, disfigured, distorted versions of what humans are…or were. Completely twisted by their own sins and by the tortures of hell. **_

_**It's hard to watch horror movies anymore. Hollywood has gotten more right then they have wrong. Makes me really wonder what goes on over there. But I keep watching them, keep trying to keep my game face firmly in place. Keep trying to forget what they looked like, who they embodied. But the dreams…my God the dreams. The blood, their faces, their touches, the heat, the cold, the thirst, the hunger, the pain, the desire, the longing, the fear…oh the fear, it all courses through me, destroys me again, and again and again. It hurts, and I wake up feeling so…disoriented. Like I was just pulled back up from the pit, like I'm back in that pine box, scared and alone. And when I close my eyes just to blink, their faces are there, their twisted sick faces, it's like someone tattooed them on the insides of my eyelids, to make sure I see them, to make sure I remember. Yeah. Like I can forget that. **_

_**I can't explain this to Sammy. I don't have the words. I just…..**_

The last words stopped, the pen mark slid across the page. Dean fell asleep. Sam's eyes were filled with tears, his heart was hurting, and his brother's breathing was beginning to change. Sam stood. He grabbed his brother's shoulder, avoiding direct contact with the skin.

"Dean." His voice gave out on the word. "Dean." He tried again louder. "Dean!" he finally yelled and his brother jerked awake, eyes wide, scared, and lost. "Dean. You're in a motel room. In Illinois. You're okay. You aren't in Hell." Dean nodded frantically and swallowed thickly.

"Kay." He said and sat up and rubbed his eyes. Sam stood there helpless, scared, and lost.


	3. Hell is Relative

Sam realized, as he eagerly waited for his brother's departure to the bathroom, that he was addicted to Dean's journal. Every second his brother was out of the room he spent pouring over it, trying to understand, to know this new person that Dean had become in the months since his return from hell.

When Dean came back he was his normal self—all wise cracks and bravado. But the longer they spent fighting demons, fighting anything really, Dean's brash bravado seemed to tarnish around the edges, and now, almost seven months later, Dean was a tense shell of the man he used to be. Dean had always been so exuberant, so full of life and every single little thing that was good in his life, from a home cooked meal, to a good old movie on television, made him smile and he acted like it was God's gift to him. Now, Dean's exuberance was replaced with quiet tension, and his lust for life was replaced with a lust for alcohol and escape.

As soon as the door clicked shut, Sam was off of the chair in front of the computer and digging through his brother's duffel and he grabbed the treasure, the only key to unlocking his brother.

He flipped past the angry scribbles that he read several days ago, the ones that were crinkled from water damage, that had occurred when Dean's tears had covered the pages, and were further ruined when Sam's tears joined his brother's on the pages. He finally found the pages his brother had written the night before.

The water turned on in the shower and Sam sighed in relief that his brother would be at least a half an hour, and that would allow Sam to read and process the six pages his brother had covered with frantic handwriting.

_**The rack. I keep talking about what happened while I was on it. While I was being tortured, how they tortured me and what the demons looked like and the smells, the sights and the sounds of all of that, but I always stop right before I talk about what it is like to torture others. And that is what tortures me most. That is what I dream about. I dream about the faces that I made contort with pain, the bodies I made writhe under my care, the sounds of their screams and their cries of remorse and their pleading, pleading with me to stop, calling to my humanity. **_

_**One of them went, "Dean Winchester? I was told that you help people." The face looked at me with relief as if I was the savior, and I ordered that that man be strapped down, and I started the carving, I called for the blood to be wiped away so I could make more precise incision in tender skin, dig my finger into the hole I just made.**_

_**The voices would scream, and scream, and I wanted to say that I was sorry, wanted to tell them I didn't have a choice, but when I apologized I was put on the rack and forced to endure pain, pain that is incomprehensible to the normal person. Mortal bodies blissfully go unconscious when the pain becomes too much, but in hell, you never go unconscious, even when the last part of your body has been ripped to shreds, you simply continue to exist, continue to feel the pain, continue all of it. So I wouldn't apologize to the soul I was torturing, I wouldn't say anything, I would just cut, slice, cut some more, pull out nails, stretch,---everything that was done to me. Everything. Sometimes I cried. But most times I did it with a numbness inside of me that only stopped when I stopped, and then I would feel the pain, a new kind of pain a pain that I wasn't used to feeling, a pain that was so deep in my chest and stomach that it burned, sizzled up my throat and then came out in vomit and dry heaves. **_

_**There were so many of them. SO many of them that I hurt, that I destroyed, that I helped along on the path to demonhood, some that deserved it, some that didn't deserve it. And now, they haunt my dreams. People I have never met. I hurt them, I selfishly saved myself from torment and destroyed them in the process, Alistair was right, I had promise. I had such promise that it was disgusting. I was becoming one of them. My eyes weren't turning black, but they were close. I was getting good at my job, I was even starting to take some sort of pride in my work towards the end. I was becoming them. **_

_**My dreams are filled with their faces, their blood, their guts, their everything all over my hands and face, my eyes stay the same, they stay that same green that I always have known, and that is what makes this whole thing worse. Me, Dean Winchester, son of John and Mary, brother and protector of Sam, hunter and friend of Bobby, became a monster in the pit. I became the destroyer of people. I destroyed who I was. I will never be Dean ever again. I am merely borrowing his name and face. I have destroyed myself.**_

Sam put the book down, looked up tears streaming down his face and was confronted with his brother, clad in jeans and no shirt, hand print scar standing out on his pale skin, green eyes, that had looked at him and protected him for years, and saw their fear, their sadness, and their hatred.

"What in the hell Sammy?"

"I had to know."

"I didn't want you to know. If I wanted you to know I would have told you."

"But I had to know."

"So, you know. What good is it doing you?"

"I'm getting to know you again."

"You don't want to know this me."

"I'm your brother."

"I'm a monster."

"You did what you had to."

"I did what would save my ass."

"Sometimes that is what you have to do."

"That's crap and you know it. I broke."

"You broke because I wasn't there to save your ass."

"Whatever Sammy." He said and went to his duffel and found the shirt he had forgotten to take into the bathroom.

"I'm here Dean."

"I don't want you here for this Sammy." He said roughly and started towards the bathroom and closed the door before Sam could say anything else. Sam looked back down at the journal and went to the desk and got a pen.

_**Hell is relative. I had sex with a demon. I had sex with a demon not because if I didn't, I would face incomprehensible pain, but because I was weak and needed something, anything, so I could feel again. I bled and didn't feel it, I hurt people I loved because I was hurting, and I gave away a piece of my soul, willingly to a demon, because I wanted revenge. I became what I hated….my dad. I broke a promise and I gave into demonic forces, and I deserve what the angels say. I have become something that I'm not. Hell comes in many forms, but we all suffer, and we all dream about the people we've hurt. **_

_**Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil… **_


End file.
